@Bryce, Selenium is great, but I don't think it will ever replace unit or functional tests. It works very well for testing the flow between multiple pages, javascript, and making sure the full stack of your app works. I would not use it for testing complicated business logic or numerous edge cases.

AFAIK, out of the box this doesn't work with autotest, but I'm sure it's possible to hack that functionality together somehow. I haven't tried.

I personally wouldn't find autotest support very useful. To me acceptance tests are something that don't have to be run as often as unit or functional tests. However I'm still trying to figure out how best to fit Selenium into my workflow.

I can't install git on my laptop. It's an old Lombard with Panther 10.3. I downloaded the selenium-on-rails package from the github website, but I'm not sure how to install it. It includes one very long filename. Can anyone show me how to install it?

It is indeed useful to test the flow, from functionality perspective. But most of the time we have problem with different browsers that the visual presentation of web pages differ a lot. Say it looks most of the time OK in FF, but just bad in IE. And the javascript is not surely to work on different browsers either. Can Selenium help on those issues?

@Quincy you likely downloaded the ".tar" file. You'll need to uncompress this. Once you do you'll end up with a folder with the plugin inside. Rename the folder to 'selenium-on-rails' and move it into your vendor/plugins directory and you should be good to go.

@Yuchen testing the visual look of the page would be hard to do programatically with any tool. You may want to try scripting Selenium to take a screenshot when going to certain pages. Then you can quickly review all of these. I haven't looked into this so I'm not sure how difficult/possible it is.

As for testing Javascript, Selenium can certainly do this (as I show in the episode) and I find it to be one of the big reasons to use it.

Great screencast. I've been using Selinium for about a year now, good product and getting better all the time. About 2 weeks ago I posted a small description of how I'm testing www.graphsy.com with selenium. If anyone is interested you can check it out at:
http://www.blog.graphsy.com/?p=18
In that post I try to show how mouse events can be simulated and tested for in selenium.

Thanks for a great screencast, more people need to know about selenium.

I would be interested if anyone has any thoughts of how and when to integrate Selenium alongside a BDD workflow, especially when using Rspec and Rails.

I've been preparing to write some Rspec user stories for my app, but my first impressions of Selenium are making me think again. Selenium seems to be much quicker, more intuitive and more comprehensive by including the browser into the equation.

The only thing that's holding me back from jumping headfirst into Selenium right this minute is the fact that its geared up for testing rather than specing and I'm rather keen on the BDD conventions.

James, I think you can kind of do BDD testing with selenium, as long as you first prototype what your front end looks like. If you make the views you want to use, or at least stay consistent with you ID values of ways of referencing fields you can write selenium cases for them before actually implementing anything. Though, then you will need to write everything by hand and the Selenium IDE will not be as useful. My development process tends to be just that, first prototype the front end, then make selenium cases for it, and then hook it up to the back end. Hope that helps.

Since my comment, above, I have found quite a few people who are working with both Rspec and Selenium. I did try to post a comment with links to relevant pages, but Akismet thought it was spam. If anyone is interested in working with both these tools and integrating Selenium into a BDD workflow, then just google "Rspec and Selenium" and some interesting projects come up.